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Fedora, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris Benchmarks

Phoronix: Fedora, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris Benchmarks

Last week we published the first Debian GNU/kFreeBSD benchmarks that compared the 32-bit and 64-bit performance of this Debian port -- that straps the FreeBSD kernel underneath a Debian GNU user-land -- to Debian GNU/Linux. We have now extended that comparison to put many other operating systems in a direct performance comparison to these Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD snapshots of 6.0 Squeeze to Fedora 12, FreeBSD 7.2, FreeBSD 8.0, OpenBSD 4.6, and OpenSolaris 2009.06.

Interesting indeed

I just have a few thoughts that would make this test even more interesting, at least for me:

Setup each OS according to how they're normally set up. Out-of-the box benchmarks are only relevant for OS/distros that are run with out-of-the box binaries. For FreeBSD do a cvsup of both source and ports tree, and set some sane defaults in /etc/make.conf and rebuild world. A sane setup for the t61 is
CPUTYPE?=core2
CFLAGS=-O2 -pipe
I suggest also building all required apps from ports instead of using precompiled packages.
As Debian and Fedora is often run with out-of-the box binaries nothing needs to be done there. OpenSolaris benchmarks should be compiled with sunstudio-compiler suite, it's only a pkg install sunstudio12u1 away.

OpenSolaris suggestion:

I suggest you use the latest OpenSolaris patches and build, the next time you bench OpenSolaris. Just press "update manager"(?) and update to the latest build, which is build 131 right now. You are using build 111. There are new builds every other weeks.

One bench showed 76% higher performance just a few builds later. OpenSolaris is in heavy revision and has not hit Beta stage yet. It is in alfa stage right now, where new functionality is added. Performance is overlooked. Later, when all functionality has been added they will start to look at performance (and to iron out bugs). Just like game programming, only at the end they will concentrate on raising FPS. OpenSolaris is buggy right now.

The later the OpenSolaris build, the better it gets. So, I suggest you try the latest build next time. And when it hits Beta stage I bet it very fast.

I mean, to compare an OS in heavy revision, in alfa stage against a released OS is not really saying that much?